The perverse tendency among white Western
elites to welcome and embrace non-Western peoples
and cultures while refusing to defend their own
people and culture is no mere fashion, as
superficial conservatives would have it, but a
natural and inevitable expression of a new
culturea culture of nihilismthat
has become the dominant culture of the West. The
organizing idea of this nihilist culture is that
abnormal and transgressive conduct is normalized
and celebrated, while traditional moral norms and
constraints are either ignored or subjected to
crippling social and civil penalties. Hardly a
day goes by when this dominant nihilism does not
announce its presence in unmistakable terms, as
seen in the following items, selected almost at
random from contemporary events (the reader is
invited to think of his own examples):

High school pupils who physically attack
their teachers go unpunished, while a police
officer who slapped a boy he discovered
having sex with his daughter is suspended
from his job.

Male and female students at elite colleges
are housed together in the same dorms, using
the same bathrooms, while religious students
who don't want to be forced to live in this
libertine environment are told they should
have gone to school elsewhere.

People who want the Unabomber executed are
described by the New York Times as
"angry," while people who consider
the Unabomber a hero are described by the Times
in neutral, nonjudgmental terms.

Hospitals are informed by federal courts
that carrying on hospital business in the
English language is
"discrimination," while illegal
aliens using those hospitals are told they
have a "right" under the U.S.
Constitution to be addressed in their native
languages.

Laws against disability discrimination
punish employers for failing to hire or make
"reasonable accommodations" for
hostile or violent or chronically late
employees.

This systematic inversion of normal and
abnormal, of law and lawlessness, of good and
evil, goes beyond mere democratic leveling. It is
a rebellion against what philosophers call the
order of existence. Ultimately, it is a rebellion
against God and the belief that man is made in
the image of God. When man gets rid of the belief
(which comes through revelation and rational
intuition) that he is made in the image and
likeness of God, man is notas secularists
imagineenhanced. He is degraded. If man is
not made in God's image, then he is made in his
own image. If God is not the measure of all
things, then man is the measure. But without a
higher truth to raise him above himself and his
disordered impulses, man inexorably sinks,
finally becoming so contemptible that he can no
longer believe in God or in man. So he begins to
worship non-human, sub-human, anti-human
behaviors and forms.

The organizing idea of
this nihilist culture is that abnormal
and transgressive conduct is normalized
and celebrated, while traditional moral
norms and constraints are either ignored
or subjected to crippling social and
civil penalties.

The manifestations of this depravity
can be seen not only in our popular
entertainments (e.g., the Jerry Springer
Show and most prime-time television) and
"lifestyles" (e.g.,
face-piercing and vampirism), but in the
so-called high culture of post-1960s
America. Sculptures and monuments once
embodied a heroic-divine ideal going back
to the ancient Greeks. But today our
typical public sculptures portray
grotesque shapes of victimhood, human
figures bedraggled and twisted in pain,
as though the universe were one vast
Auschwitz. It is an aesthetic in which
any sense of human dignity in
suffering is erased.

Alongside the depiction of human beings as
hopeless victims, we have now statues of
monsters. In recent years New York City has
displayed in its public parks and squares such
"art works" as a 25-foot-long statue of
an insect, and a statue of a gigantic, hideous
dog as high as a man, with huge dugs projecting
downward like knives. These sculptures are our
postmodern equivalents of the terror-gods of the
pre-Columbian cultures. When man loses belief in
God, he also loses respect for man, and turns to
non-human or anti-human figures as symbols of the
malign spiritual universe he now inhabits.

The postmodern degradation of man and culture
begins with the modern idea of placing all human
beings, and even all of nature, on an equal
plane, free of the burden of transcendence. The
logic of this agenda has been put forth in a
remarkable essay by religion professor Steven C.
Rockefeller, appearing in the volume Multiculturalism
and "The Politics of Recognition,"
by Charles Taylor. Blending deep ecology with
multiculturalism, Rockefeller enunciates what is
in effect a new religion. "All life is
sacred," he writes, "[and] all life
forms should be respected as a 'thou' and not
just as an 'it.' ... If, as has been suggested, all
cultures as well as all life forms are of
intrinsic value and also sacred, then from a
religious perspective all are in this sense equal
in value." [italics added].

All of this is, of course, a total inversion
of the Jewish and Christian world view, which
tells us that God is holy, not the world, and
that human beings can become holy by orienting
themselves toward God: "Be holy, for I the
LORD your God am holy." But according to
Rockefeller's gospel, everything that
existsplants, animals, humans, and (most of
all) Third-world culturesis not only holy,
but equally so:

If one employs this kind of religious
argument in defense of the idea of equal
value, one should recognize its full
implications. It is opposed to
anthropocentrism [the idea that man is higher
or more important than animals or plants] as
well as to all egoisms of class, race, or
culture. It calls for an attitude of
humility. It encourages a respect for, and
pride in, one's own particular identity only
insofar as such respect and pride grow out of
recognition of the value of the uniqueness in
the identity of all other peoples and life
forms. Furthermore, if what is sacred in
humanity is life, which is not something
exclusively human, then humanity's primary
identity is not just with the human species
but with the entire biosphere that envelopes
planet Earth.

Thus, according to Rockefeller, it is no
longer God above man, and God's spirit working
within man, that is divine, but mere biological
life, in respect of which man is equal with
crustacea, worms, and viruses. Instead of being
humble before God and the nobler manifestations
of mankind, we are supposed to be humble before
plants and animals and primitive cultures. Most
importantly, our own culture has no right to
self-respect unless we first have total respect
for all other cultures and life-forms.

Rockefeller continues:

The call for recognition of the equal
value of different cultures is the expression
of a basic and profound universal human need
for unconditional acceptance. A feeling of
such acceptance, including affirmation of
one's ethnic particularity as well as one's
universally shared potential, is an essential
part of a strong sense of identity.... The
politics of recognition may, therefore also
be an expression of a complex human need for
acceptance and belonging, which on the
deepest level is a religious need.

Unconditional acceptance (!) as a sacred right
(!) of every person and culture! Try to imagine
what this would mean in practical terms. Of
course, there's a catch, which Rockefeller makes
explicit elsewhere in his essay. Only some
cultures and life-forms (namely white Western
males) are actually obligated to extend this
unconditional acceptance to other cultures and
life forms, while those other cultures and
life-forms are only expected to receive
such recognition, as is their divine right.

In Steven Rockefeller's mad epiphany, we seem
to hear the final, degenerate gasp of the
Protestant spirit that made America. In the
earlier stages of this devolution, the Protestant
loses his Christian faith, which eventually
leaves him with nothing but "niceness."
Then this "niceness"cut off from
the religious faith that was its source and
discipline, but still in need of a
"divine" sanctionspreads out
indiscriminately until it embraces the whole
universe, ultimately taking the form of nature
worship, the belief in the equality of all
cultures and life-forms, and the totalitarian
religion of "unconditional acceptance."

But the religion of cosmic equality, as crazy
as it is, is not the end of the process. The
attempt to eliminate all hierarchy and
transcendence leads inevitably to an inverted
hierarchy, in which man, particularly Western
man, is at the bottom. The Bible placed man near
the top of a divinely ordered universe, only a
little lower than the angels. But now the radical
egalitarians tell us that man is no better than
animals, who (it is argued), also communicate and
reason, and are less destructive than humans.
"And as with animals," remarks the late
literary critic Peter Shaw in his collection of
essays, The War against the Intellect,
"so with primitive man and with societies
less developed than our own: both are closer to
the sources of natural wisdom, and both wreak
less damage upon the ecosystem and biosphere than
does Western man." As an extreme example of
this inversion, Shaw quotes the popular left-wing
paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould:

Evolution is a copiously branching
network, not a ladder, and I do not see how
we, the titular spokesmen for a few thousand
mammalian species, can claim superiority over
three quarters of a million species of
insects who will surely outlive us, not to
mention the bacteria, who have shown
remarkable staying power for more than three
billion years.

"Here we have very nearly the ultimate
demotion of man," comments Shaw, "the
inferior not only of primitive peoples, other
mammals, and the cockroach, but even of
bacteria."

But, as Shaw points out, there is just one
little problem with this belief in the
superiority of primitive cultures: It is not
true. Therefore it can only be sustained by
ceaseless mental gymnastics. Embarrassing
evidence, if it can't be suppressed, must be
re-interpreted so as to make it fit within the
egalitarian paradigm. For example, it came to
light some years ago that the ancient
Mayanslong thought of as an exemplary,
peaceful civilizationengaged in horrifying
practices. Before going to war, reported the
New York Times, "the king would
puncture his penis with a stingray spine, while
his wife drew a thorn-barbed rope through her
tongue."

The Mayans waged war in order to capture
aristocrats for torture and sacrifice; the
captives would sometimes play ball games using
the decapitated heads of the losers as balls. The
Times admitted that the evidence of
these practices had been available for decades in
stone reliefs and paintings, but that scholars
had explained it all away in order to keep the
Maya on a "mist-shrouded pedestal,"
where they could be idealized as an austere and
enlightened people. But while the new evidence
has shattered that peaceful image, it has not
ended the need to portray nonwhite and
non-Western cultures in a positive light.
Anthropologists now argue that the Mayan practice
of royal self-laceration indicates "a
cooperative, sacred relationship between the
elites and the commoners." In other words,
remarks Peter Shaw, "if the evidence shows a
society's aristocrats obsessed with
self-mutilation and torture, a bit of
interpretation will help us see beneath the
surface to the class solidarity so characteristic
of pre-Columbian America and so lamentably
missing from the modern world."

More recently, the human sacrifice cult of the
pre-Inca Moche culture of Peru, memorialized in
the ubiquitous image of the Decapitator, a
demonic grimacing figure holding a severed head
in one hand and a curved blade in the other, has
been interpreted by Stanford anthropologist John
Rick, not as the sacred core of the Moche
culture, which it obviously was, but as a
temporary expedient through which the Moche
ruling class solidified its political power over
a recalcitrant populace. Once the Moche elites
were safely established through the use of
violence, Professor Rick told The News Hour, they
were "no more violent than ourselves."
Thus, in the practiced manner of a contemporary
liberal academic, Rick effortlessly made it seem
that there is no essential difference between an
ancient death cult and the
"oppressions" of modern America.

What anthropologists write in their academic
journals, public school teachers, judges,
reporters, and social workers are disseminating
through the whole society. When the New York
Times referred to car thieves and police in
Newark, New Jersey as two "cultures"
that were "clashing," and spoke of a
deranged woman sitting on a sidewalk as having a
"culture" that was different from the
"culture" of the shoppers walking past
her; when a New York City case worker refused to
investigate a Nigerian immigrant who had been
torturing his son for months, on the grounds that
such beatings were part of the father's culture;
when American teachers excuse the Japanese for
their inhuman brutalities during World War II,
while damning the U.S. for the wartime relocation
of Japanese-Americans in California; when the
national media covers up an endless series of
horrifying racial murders of whites by blacks,
while generating national hysteria over a
non-existent white racist plot to burn black
churches, the underlying idea is always the same:
never to allow a non-Western or nonwhite people
to be portrayed in a critical light, while
portraying whites and Western culture in the
harshest light possible.

As David Shipler, an apostle of racial
correctness, inadvertently reveals in his recent
book A Country of Strangers: Black and White
in America, this systematic denial of plain
evidence by "right-thinking" whites is
achieved through a deliberate act of
self-hypnosis:

This is the ideal: to search your
attitudes, identify your sterotypes, and
correct for them as you go about your daily
duties.

This, at its Orwellian core, is the mindset
that enables contemporary whites never to
entertain a negative conclusion about blacks,
while always making whites themselves responsible
for blacks' moral and intellectual failings. This
(in Joseph Sobran's useful coinage) is alienism:
"a prejudice in favor of the alien, the
marginal, the dispossessed, the eccentric,
reaching an extreme in the attempt to 'build a
new society' by destroying the basic institutions
of the native." This is the intellectual and
spiritual environment which, combined with racial
diversification, has turned America into the
opposite of itselfinto the anti-white,
anti-Christian, anti-rational, anti-American
anti-nation that is Multicultural America.

Lawrence Auster is the author
of Huddled Clichespublished by American
Immigration Control Foundation, Monterey,
Virginia.